Photo Printing Resources Plainville CT

Photo printing can be done in-store and at home. Find out how to print professional looking photos. Below you’ll find related articles as well as local companies and providers that will help you in your search for photo printing.

Top Ten B&W Printing Mistakes

Top Ten B&W Printing Mistakes - 5/4/09

Avoid these pitfalls to improve your prints.

By William Sawalich

Sometimes the abundance of options in the digital realm makes certain tasks increasingly difficult. How do you choose the best approach if you don’t know which methods aren’t up to par? For quality black & white prints, avoid these common mistakes for a much better chance at success.

1. Printing grayscale files with color inks. The color casts will drive you crazy. Get around it by subtle toning, or even better by printing using only black inks.

2. Heavy-handed toning. If what you’re after is a black and white print, remember that subtlety rules. Don’t try to mask a funky color cast with a gaudy toned effect.

3. Switching to grayscale and clicking print. The first part of a great black and white print is a great grayscale conversion—made with aftermarket plug-ins or appropriate controls like channel mixer or black & white adjustment layers.

4. Shooting in black & white. Even if your camera can capture black & white, shoot in color to have more information to work with in the computer. That color information will go a long way to making a great black & white conversion.

5. Avoiding asking for help. You don’t need a mortgage-bending home printer, nor do you need to do every print yourself. Consider contracting the help of a professional lab or custom printer to print your black and white for you.

6. Converting to B&W because nothing else is helping. Don’t just expect that black & white will make any picture better. Some photos work better in color—and some photos just don’t work no matter what you do to them in post.

7. Avoiding experimentation. There are lots of paper options out there, and most of them are good for something. If you don’t experiment with papers, or if you choose a surface that isn’t appropriate for your subject, you’re doing your print a disservice.

8. Forgetting traditional darkroom techniques. Dodging, burning and vignetting are crucial, even in digital. There’s a reason they worked for so long in conventional darkrooms—and they’re equally important to a good digital print.

9. Avoiding testing. Darkroom printers make test strips and many work prints. Why should digital be any different. Make sample strips with adjustments to contrast, color, sharpness and more to see exactly what works best.

10. Forgetting to previsualize. Ansel Adams knew what he wanted a print to look like before he clicked the shutter. It’s important to previsualize before making a b&w conversion, and before making the final print. Don’t just take what your printer gives you; take control, previsualize and make a great print happen.

Trade Tricks: Color Harmony

Trade Tricks: Color Harmony

For the best prints, get your printer and monitor on the same page

By Adam Crawford

The path to getting a better print starts with a color-managed workflow. Calibrating your monitor is an important first step, but for the ultimate in control, you'll also want to create ICC profiles for your printer.

An ICC profile is a small data file that tells devices how to interpret each other's data. Since no two devices (i.e., your monitor and printer) "see" colors in exactly the same way, a translator is needed to help them speak the same language. That's what an ICC profile does, ensuring that the colors you see on your monitor will be faithfully reproduced in your prints. It might sound complicated, but in practice, calibration hardware and software make it an easy process.

The Path To Color Fidelity The first step to a better print is calibrating your monitor to get the most accurate depiction of your photo on your computer's screen. That's important because you want to see the image accurately before you make adjustments. Tweaking an image on an uncalibrated monitor can cause you to make wrong or unnecessary adjustments, and that can lead to the degradation of your image file.

Calibrating your monitor starts with a colorimeter, a small device that attaches to your monitor and measures wavelengths of light generated by the calibration software. These measurements are used by the software to help you adjust your screen for true output.

The next step is to profile your printer. Profiling a printer also uses a colorimeter (or spectrophotometer) to read printed targets of various colors.

X-Rite offers the EZcolor with the i1Display 2 Bundle, which lets you profile multiple devices, including your monitor, scanner and printer. The bundle comes with EZcolor software that creates ICC profiles for your printer through a process of reading a target sheet through your scanner. After calibrating your system, EZcolor software allows you to "soft-proof," or view your images on screen before you print. The bundle is simple to set up and offers a software wizard to walk you through the process. List Price: $498.

Datacolor's iteration of monitor calibration and printer profiling is called Spyder3Studio. The bundle includes a colorimeter, software for printing and monitor calibration, and a spectrocolorimeter to read the included color calibration target to create custom profiles for your printer. List Price: $599.

Calibrating for better prints is easy, and the small investment in time will save you much more time (and paper and inks) in the long run.

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